The Director's Cut 2: The Dying Rooms

Next
Friday at 9.00pm Community Channel brings you the second episode
of the Director’s Cut, The Dying Rooms.

In an exclusive interview
with the film’s directors they discuss the harrowing experience
of making the film followed by the documentary that exposed the
systematic and horrific abuses in China’s state run orphanages.

“They're very thin. They have been left inside for
a while, for several days. Their bodies are full of insects. Some
of the children are covered with pus all over their bodies. Some
of them are without clothes, completely naked.”- Ai Ming who
spent 19 years in the Shanghai orphanage.

In June 1995 the documentary The Dying Rooms first transmitted on
television. The programme exposed the terrible conditions and systematic
neglect of abandoned children and babies in China’s state-run
orphanages.

The film showed the horrific conditions that these children were
subject to including babies whose hands and feet had been eaten
by rats, and actual an dying room where an unwanted baby girl had
been left ten days earlier to die of starvation and neglect.

In
the Director’s Cut, filmmakers Brian Woods and Kate Blewett
discuss the making of their documentary, the experience of witnessing
the abuse first-hand, and a decade on reflect on their agonising
decision to smuggle their tapes out of China rather then save the
life of a dying child.

The original documentary is shown in full after the Director’s
cut followed by a special appeal from the charity COCOA.

Watch The Director’s Cut: The Dying Rooms on Friday
February 17 at 9.00pm on Community Channel.